Nick Cave and Warren Ellis – colleagues in the Bad Seeds, Grinderman and soundtracking – have specialized in scores saturated with dusty, desolate elegies (The Proposition; The Road; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford). The setting of Lawless (whose screenplay was written by Cave) – Prohibition-era Virginia – would seem to lend itself to the same treatment, but the soundtrack features a blue-chip singers’ circle, mostly backed by Cave and Ellis’s ad-hoc band, the Bootleggers. Vocalists and songs make repeat appearances: Mark Lanegan’s leather-bound baritone leads an irresistible hard-strumming cover of Link Wray’s country-blues barnburner Fire and Brimstone, which is reprised in a very mortal performance by Ralph Stanley, whose craggy take on the Cave/Ellis composition Fire in the Blood is contrasted with two serene readings of the same by Emmylou Harris. The recurring guests and material add to the cohesion of a soundtrack with a vibrant sense of time and place. By turns raucous and sombre, authentic and revisionist (the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat is convincingly transported to the 1930s by Stanley), the album hardly needs a film to justify its existence.

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